Household names? Not on the 2013 Marlins

Team President David Samson said the team will be a slave to results, not names.

November 17, 2012|By Juan C. Rodriguez, Sun Sentinel

The Marlins have said they went "all in" in 2012. Many fans might suggest they are all out for 2013 after learning this week of the pending trade with the Blue Jays that will send Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, Jose Reyes, Emilio Bonifacio and John Buck to Toronto.

If the season started tomorrow, four of the seven players the Marlins are getting back in the deal project to be on the 25-man roster. One of those (Jeff Mathis) is a light-hitting back-up catcher.

The Marlins also got back a possible shortstop-third base combination in Adeiny Hechavarria and Yunel Escobar, but the Marlins are open to flipping Escobar, a veteran big league shortstop.

"What we're trying to do is get better," Samson said Thursday, during his weekly radio spot on 790 The Ticket. "It's hard sometimes to rip a Band-Aid off. We feel as though over time, the players that may come back, you may not know them but people in baseball do and it's not like I'm having my daughter play second base next year.

"A good lesson is, and I guess we always knew it but we really got swept up in last year, you don't win a pennant in November and December, and frankly you don't lose a pennant in November in December."

Samson pointed to the 2012 Oakland Athletics as proof of the latter. The Athletics before last season traded three-fifths of their rotation: Gio Gonzalez, Trevor Cahill and Guillermo Moscoso. Rookie Tommy Milone led them with 31 starts and the Athletics still won 94 games and the American League West.

The Marlins began last season with a rotation of Johnson, Buehrle, Ricky Nolasco, Anibal Sanchez and Carlos Zambrano. They had a combined 437 wins and more than 6,600 innings.

One 2013 projected rotation of Nolasco, Jacob Turner, Henderson Alvarez, Nate Eovaldi and Wade LeBlanc has a combined 112 career wins and 1,948 innings. Buehrle alone entered 2012 with more than 500 innings than that group.

Nolasco becomes the de facto No. 1 starter. Though Nolasco believes otherwise, Samson said the plan is to start the season with him.

"You may not know the names, but you may know the victories," said Samson, who himself is still learning the names, evidenced by his butchering of Alvarez's name two days in a row on the radio. "It may not be popular during the offseason, but [the Athletics] ended their season in a pile and we did not."

Samson added that new manager Mike Redmond was aware of the club's position on and off the field. A source who spoke with Redmond after the trade said he was not taken aback by the deal.

Stanton and Escobar are the most seasoned major leaguers in that group with 3,311 and 1,498 career plate appearances, respectively. Solano, Brantly and Hechavarria all have played fewer than 100 big league games.

"I certainly don't like to be distrusted," Samson said. "Nobody likes to feel that way. When you do your job every day and you have people scrutinizing and first-guessing, second- and third-guessing, you still try to do what's right for your job. Our job is to win games and in years past to make sure baseball would be around forever [in South Florida].

"I want to earn that trust every day and I think the best way to earn it is by being honest about what we have and not be seduced necessarily by names but be an absolute slave to results. That's what we are and that's what I hope will show. I really hope these decisions were right. I hope the more right decisions we make, the more trust there is, but it's a tough job, not that it's life or death. It's just hard to get everything right. You try to get more right than wrong."